Litigation Support is one of the most interesting aspects of our practice.  It is an opportunity to examine closely what happened in a variety of situations and what might be done in the future to avoid these failures.

The heart of our Litigation Support practice is working with legal counsel in the following areas:

• Identify supportive facts and arguments and facts that might undermine a position
• Search through discovery artifacts to determine cause and find gems of fact that support the case
• Prepare Expert Opinions
• Trial Preparation, including preparing visuals
• Testifying in Depositions and Court Proceedings

Our projects have focuses on the following types of disputes and services:

• ERP Implementation Failures
• IT Software and Services failures
• Disagreements among IT providers
• ERP contract disputes
• Expert Opinions for Patent Defense

Memorable cases include a dispute between a General IT Contractor (“General”) and a Subcontractor (“Sub”).  The Sub was responsible for documenting the work of the General Contractor.  In this case, the General Contractor’s client was a government agency that was having problems finalizing its requirements, thereby delaying the General Contractor’s work and leaving the documentation subcontractor in a precarious position.  The sub was responsible for documenting software that did not yet exist.  The complication that was undoing the contract was the basis up which fees were determined.  The General Contractor had a fixed fee contract; the Subcontractor had a T&M (time and materials) contract with the General.  As the project lengthened, the Subcontractor’s fees accumulated.  The General Contractor wanted the Subcontractor to complete the documentation when the evolving software was finally completed.  This put the Subcontractor on the hook for an unknown amount of additional services at some time in the future.  A truly interesting dispute. 

In another case, the client sued its ERP Vendor over a failed ERP implementation and an unusable cloud contract.  The Software firm assured the client that their Configurator would meet the client’s needs, which was impossible given the specifics of the situation.  Without a functional Configurator, the cloud-based system was useless.  The client won the dispute receiving a full refund of fees paid, rescission of the SaaS contract and reimbursement of its legal and expert fees. 

Two common threads in these situations are ERP systems that over promise and under deliver, often by a wide margin, and insufficient project management especially in the area of significant differences between the parties.